Our 2067 future
Artist’s rendition from the 1903 Hamilton Spectator Cardinal Souvenir supplement of downtown Hamilton, including Gore Park as envisioned for 2003.
IN OUR WORLD OF 2067, the only thing a man of 1967 may recognize is the ground he walks on — the Niagara Escarpment.
He would be bewildered by the number of people, by the absence of noise and by the brilliant ribbon of green cutting through the city.
The National Park is unusual, because it runs from the Wilderness Reserve of Manitoulin through Hamilton to the constellation of cities in the Peninsula.
The National Parks Service has recently indicated that the re-forestation of the escarpment, in the great “year 2000 plan,” has produced a landscape second to none in the world.
When the mail-rocket landed this morning in our city, what a contrast to 1967 lay beneath it as it came in to the Civic Rocketport.
No provinces
Beneath its guided path lay our City of Hamilton with a population of 2,000,000. The vast urban corridor of the St. Lawrence Valley sparkled in the morning light.
Our ancestors were appalled to think of a city so large. What would they think of a nation of 200,000,000 organized on a multi-racial basis? What would they think of a Canada without provinces? What would they think of a Canada which every year builds a new city of 1,000,000 persons and feeds half the world’s hungry?
What would they have done, had they known that a century of peace lay before them?
Within this vast city, some visible evidence of the past reminds us of the years up to 1967: the preserved and restored battlefields of Stoney Creek and Burlington Heights and the charming villages of Greensville and Ancaster, Kilbride and Carlisle.
Old photographs show us that once these places were in the countryside.
Of course, the Devil’s Punchbowl and the Dundas Valley remind us of what that landscape was like, and the old mill in Ancaster serves as a quaint relic of the pioneers.
What though, would the crude society of 1967 have thought of our systematic destruction of all their ghastly architecture? It’s still hard to understand why citizens in this year of 2067 would wish to restore an example of the “strip commercial” developments of that era of 1967. We only hope that in 3067 the project will have mellowed.
‘Glassbox’
But the last remnants of that delightful period of “glassbox” should be preserved. Perhaps citizens could write to the national government in Winnipegosis and remind them of this duty.
It’s nice to see the last remaining church spire in the city which survived the earthquake of 2024 has become a public monument.
Upon the area which our ancestors called “the Mountain,” gigantic towers match those of Toronto across the Lake. But what would the world of 1967 think to see that the old steel industry no longer dominates the harbor? Or to see that the last vestiges of Highway 403 are being grubbed out of Coote’s Paradise?
From the great restaurants of the highest tower on the Mountain, the panorama shows the redevelopment of the industrial harbor. Who could have guessed that when the Saltfleet irrigation canal was built, Hamilton would lose its steel industry?
Again, from the same vantage point, the Beverly National Forest stands out in sharp contrast to the previous age. All the struggles of foresters over past decades are now showing results. And the new city flows around its dense greenery.
New cities
The change is more dramatic when we visit the village of Rockton, in the heart of the trees, and realize that the area was once farmland.
From 200 feet above the crest of the Escarpment we can turn, to see to the south the vast extent of those mass-produced housing areas of the 1980-2000 period: despite their gridiron layout, and the minuscule scale of the prefabricated housing, the projects have aged well, and perhaps it was because of the generous landscaping. How odd those formal boulevards, and how rigid the modular structure seems.
Beyond, on the heights beyond Stoney Creek, matching the area above Dundas, the pinnacles of the new cities of Turbinia and Osler stand shining in the sun. They are surrounded by the irrigated lands of intensive farming and the checker-board landscape with its controlled climate domes and sequence of canals, totally unlike that of the previous century.
One enterprising project of the city is to preserve a huge mountain of junked 20th century automobiles, 200 feet high, rather than to remove it. Painted gold, it has all the chances of becoming a national monument.
A scale model of the old Burlington Skyway has been placed in the National Museum, and the isthmus has now been greatly widened to accommodate the University of the Inlands Waters research buildings.
The colorful ships of their fleet now use almost the whole of the old harbor, and only last year the historic wreck of the “lakers” and other craft sunk in the great storm of 2010 were raised and floated to the National Museum of the Great Lakes, which when completed will be a major attraction, totally reclaiming the derelict steel lands.
Pure Air
It was a mistake to allow the Zambian investors to build that “Hanging Gardens of Hamilton” along the water-front, but its half-mile-long pyramid has mellowed with age, and the great terraces, of course, now that they are opened to the public, give fascinating views.
But it would have been better to use the new plastic materials and the two-mile-long sinuous curves of the 150-storey “Nineveh” proposal should make an effective redevelopment of the Waterdown area. This should enable most of the remainder of Central Hamilton and old Burlington to be crisped out with laser beams.
The air in our city is now almost at pioneer levels of cleanliness: the new fusion-fission power station at Port Dover has almost replaced all the other means of heating. The garbage factory has become one the city’s best revenue-earners.
Most of all, the power-cell cars have wholly changed transportation to a silent, automated, and clean operation. Contrast these delicate egg-shaped and small efficient machines with the cumbersome vehicles of a century ago. Further, the new industrial areas in Upper Saltfleet or Outer Carluke are directed by the regional computer centre at Old McMaster’s Field, and the arrival of our advanced automation ended the old wastes.
The “new” City Hall, on the Mountain, will be soon demolished, and the renewal scheme in the Old City includes the renovation of the former council chamber to accommodate the seven-man council. Perhaps it is because we are better educated, but mainly it is because the city staff have so many automatic systems, that permit us to reduce these former bureaucracies to size.
It is a pity that the office part of the Old Hall was torn down, but space for the 10,000 book library was sorely needed.
Pools
Our ancestors would not realize how beautiful our city has become. The great central podium with its controlled climate dome allowed the core of the city to become an intricate and complex achievement of our most brilliant architects.
The system of rapid movement and the great advances in communication have evolved to more attractive forms. From our courtyard gardens, we observe pools and statues and colonnades with new varieties of unknown beauty — it may simply be that we are all much wealthier than our forefathers. Perhaps too, we have become more civilized and more discerning.
Did they foresee that McMaster would become a centre for advanced studies? Did they realize that the Barton Industrial Academy and the Six Nations Technical University would be added, and even McMaster would be relocated?
Healthier
Scarcely a family exists that has not seen the world, and poverty is by choice rather than necessity.
They feared, in those dark ages, that the world population would swamp their individual houses. We, who know the value of space, have a better life on less ground: we know the world population is stable; is healthier; and better fed.
We have seen architecture and engineering fuse to build, for those who choose so to live, new buildings which are cities in themselves.
Professor Norman Pearson took this look at Hamilton and district through the eyes of a writer in the year 2067. Prof. Pearson was chairman of the Centre for Resources Development at the University of Guelph.